


Hide and Seek

by Starsight (crownhearted)



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Other, Past Abuse, Self-Harm, nothing graphic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-01
Updated: 2016-05-01
Packaged: 2018-06-05 16:14:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6712120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crownhearted/pseuds/Starsight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life is practically perfect, so why is it that you can't be?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hide and Seek

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [it's darkest before the dawn [but i can't tell if the sun is coming up]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6708118) by [asmilemingledwithwrath](https://archiveofourown.org/users/asmilemingledwithwrath/pseuds/asmilemingledwithwrath). 



> BE ADVISED: this work is one of my (many) interpretations of Chara and Frisk's origins and contains mentions of past abuse and trauma of physical, verbal, and emotional nature.

So the monsters are free.

The happy endings are real and true. Everyone is on the surface and life has gone on. You even went down to put Flowey in a pot, refusing to believe that he should be condemned to a life alone after all he had been through. Life is good. There is pie, and laughter, and brightness in the gleam of white bones and white fangs and even white little dogs. The picture could not be more perfect, could not be more complete. Everyone has fallen into a rhythm and everyone rhymes with each other. It's smooth, and safe, and sound, in a way you have been yearning for your whole life. It's finally time to relax.

Except, that's not how it works.

You find yourself confronted with scraped palms. There are half-moon marks dug into all the places on your hands that your nails could have reached when curled inward on themselves. There are short, ripped threads of skin and red dots underneath them, pink smearing in the betweens where your surface cells haven't snapped. You smell pie, and cold pizza, and the velvet wrapping of a gourmet chocolate bar. Only one of these things should be present underneath the heavy, dark-wood frame of your bed. It's so heavy that not even Undyne was able to lift it without staggering under the weight, so why did _you_ try? There are permanent slices in the paint and wood where signs of claw marks have made their forever-marks. There are chips of it under your nails, and you think there's a splinter in your right pinky finger, but that could just be another cut.

The thing that holds your attention even as you survey the damage to your hands and your bed frame, however, is the voice inside. Chara is terrified, trembling, hostile once again- and you wish with all your might you could convince them that hiding food like this is no longer necessary. That nobody is going to hurt them and deprive them and hunt them down for a mistake. You try to convey this in words, but it doesn't really work the way you thought it would. You thought it was time to let go of all of this trauma, since the world was safe now and nothing could ever happen like that again...

Except, that's not how it works. 

* * *

 

You can't see. You can barely breathe. Your hands shake when you lock the door and you almost fall on the three-pace-adventure to the shower, turning on the water. You don't look, you just jerk the handle with extreme force, until it stops moving and the water is screaming in your ears but never louder than the screaming at the door. You see dark spots in your vision everywhere you look, making you see spiders in your peripheral and jump away from every single surface you're forced to stare at.

You take your clothes off and end up ripping the hem of your shirt when you take it off. Chara is trying to talk but you are ignoring it, you are muffling it, you are crying a little but trying really hard not to. If you have to shout back, if you have to yell something through the door, you want to make sure you don't sound weak and scared and sad the way you feel. You can't cry until you're showering.

You step in against the loud protesting in your mind and you yelp as the scalding water hits your scalp, quickly moving so that it only touches your body. Your skin turns pink. You watch it happen. You use soap and at first you're almost animal in nature, you just let it drop into your hands and rub the gel-like liquid into your skin with your aching stinging burning screaming fingertips. You shake and you cry and you hear the pounding on the bathroom door and the shouting and you swear the wood is going to crack any second now and the fist is going to burst through to claim you. Swallow you. Devour you whole.

Your shoulders, upper back, chest, stomach, thighs, calves, and the tops of your feet get the worst of it before the water runs cold. You stand in the shower for some amount of time until the shouting stops and the only pounding is that of the headache you now sport. You shut off the water and force a towel around your body, which hurts the tender and burned flesh, but you sit in the bathtub with your knees against your chest as best you can and you don't move until a soft voice calls out for you.

“Frisk? Are you alright in there? ...I left your pie for you, if you would like to eat it later. Do tell me if there is- is anything I can do for you, my child. ...Goodnight, Frisk.”

It is with abject horror that you, shambling to the bedroom and forcing your pained body into the most loose and comfortable pajamas you own, have to face the facts. And they are within your own SOUL, your mind- so you cannot avoid them.

“I...I thought...” your voice is disgusting. You are disgusting. Your body is a reminder of this. Your skin is on fire and your breath is searing hot. “I thought I was o-over all of this...” there was no pounding at the door. There was no screaming. That hasn't happened in years. “We're all supposed to be happy, now, we're all safe- there's nothing here to hurt anyone...I thought I was done...”

“Except,” they say, as they manifest themselves and run their cool fingers through your damp hair. “That is not how it works, is it, Frisk?”

 

It is four hours later that you let Toriel heal your burns. It is four days later that you ask Sans to lift the bed so that you can recover the spoiled and lost food underneath it. It is four years later that you are sure there is someone outside the bathroom door who wants to hurt you, four years that Chara tries to hide under the bed from consequences of a miniature mistake, four years that you cry together and hold each other and know that happy endings are a band-aid but people are stitches and, if you hold them close enough, you can heal.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Be mindful of any commentary please.


End file.
